When vanity marketing metrics meet real results
In many organizations, the ultimate test of marketing measurement comes down to a single question: “Did it drive sales?”
And the marketing leader has to answer for it.
The CMO points to awareness. The CFO points to revenue. The CEO wants to know not only whether the investment was successful, but whether it was worth it.
So, marketers move spend to where it is easiest to defend: the bottom of the funnel. Retargeting, branded search, the tactics that convert people who were already going to buy. Those numbers look efficient because they capture demand that already exists. What they’re not doing is creating any. So, the funnel converts well and slowly empties, because nothing upstream is refilling it.
The CFO sees flat sales against rising spending and reaches for the obvious cut: the awareness budget, the line with no return sitting next to it. It looks like the easiest thing in the room to lose.
For years, this has been framed as a debate between so-called “vanity metrics” and “real metrics.” Awareness versus revenue. Reach versus sales. Engagement versus business outcomes. It’s the most expensive thing to lose, and proving that is the marketing leader’s job. Not with conviction. With the relationship between the numbers.
The vanity metric trap that feels like success
The problem is not the metrics themselves. It is expecting a single metric to tell the whole story.
Say the team runs organic social, and the #1 metric on the dashboard is engagement. Engagement is up, so the work gets reported as a win. But nobody traced whether that engagement turned into anything. Did the people who liked and commented ever enter the funnel, move toward consideration, or show up in revenue? The number went up. Whether it mattered was never tested. That’s the problem with evaluating any metric in isolation.
Desiree Ahlberg, Marketing Data Analyst at The Point Group, puts the failure plainly:
”A dashboard full of disconnected numbers is noise. A dashboard that shows relationship is insight.
Effective marketing measurement requires more than a single metric because no single metric was designed to tell the whole story. Engagement, reach, and impressions can all climb while contributing nothing downstream. When measured in isolation, no one can tell the difference between a metric that is working and a metric that’s merely moving.
A better top-of-funnel metric won’t fix this. Connecting the metric you have to the outcome the budget is judged on will.
What the awareness cut does to acquisition cost
Take revenue. It’s the metric most organizations care about, but it is also a classic lagging indicator. When it takes a hit, it’s easy to assume a campaign isn’t working. But when the focus lies squarely on revenue, it’s easy to miss the signals that explain why performance changed in the first place.
Awareness may be increasing. Website traffic may be growing. More leads may be coming in. But those efforts don’t translate into revenue overnight. Much of the buying process happens long before a sale appears on a dashboard. Gartner reports that B2B buyers spend only about 17% of their buying time meeting with potential suppliers, so most of the research and evaluation happens out of sight.
The mechanism is concrete and visible in tools most teams already run: a recognized brand earns higher click-through rates, higher click-through rates lift Quality Scores, and higher Quality Scores buy lower cost-per-click and better ad positions. Familiarity also converts better, because when people already know who you are, your bottom-funnel tactics get cheaper. They’re working on warm ground instead of cold.
Looking only at revenue is a bit like driving while staring into the rear-view mirror. You can see where you’ve been, but not what’s coming. By the time a problem becomes visible in revenue, the opportunity to adjust may have already passed.
The awareness line and the performance line aren’t competing for budget. The first is what makes the second affordable. Cut awareness and you don’t save money—you just move the cost. Your cost-per-click drifts up, your conversion rate drifts down, and the bottom-funnel spend the CFO protected gets quietly more expensive per customer, working harder on colder audiences who’ve never heard of you.
A real-life example of how brand marketing reduces overall cost
Few companies illustrate this dynamic better than Airbnb. Airbnb spent years deliberately shifting away from performance-led marketing toward brand marketing, betting that a strong brand would carry demand that search marketing used to buy.
The bet held. Across multiple years, most of Airbnb’s web traffic has arrived through direct and unpaid channels, which means the company can spend less on performance than competitors who have to purchase every click.
That investment in brand marketing made the rest of the marketing budget more efficient.
A practical marketing measurement framework
None of this requires new resources or budget. The data is already sitting in your ad and analytics platforms.
Start by pairing an awareness signal with an acquisition-efficiency signal and watch them over time. Branded search volume is a good awareness proxy; so is direct traffic, or impression share on your own name. For cost, track cost-per-click and conversion rate on your bottom-funnel campaigns.
Now line them up across the same months and look for the relationship: when awareness rises, does your cost-per-click fall and your conversion rate climb a few weeks or months later? When you cut awareness spend, did acquisition get more expensive?
You can chart the relationship from tools you already pay for. It won’t be a perfectly clean line because real data never is. Seasonality, promotions, economic factors, and competitor moves can all push on it, so widen the window and look for the pattern that holds rather than a single tidy month. The direction will usually be legible, and a chart that clearly shows “awareness rises, and three months later acquisition costs drop” is something the CFO can read without taking anything on faith.
When the data stack is richer and the stakes justify it, the rigorous version is marketing mix modeling (“MMM”). MMM statistically separates how much each input, including the slow-paying brand work, contributed to revenue while accounting for lag effects and seasonality. It is the same idea built for scale. You don’t need it to make the case, only when you want it airtight to the dollar.
Both the scrappy chart and the formal model answer the same question: what is awareness worth, and when does it pay back?
The question to ask instead
The next time a marketing measurement review comes down to one question, “Did it drive sales?” consider asking another: “What happened before the sale?”
Knowing the outcome matters. Knowing what drove it is what sharpens the next decision.
The awareness you are pressured to cut is, in most cases, the thing that made the sale affordable in the first place. It’s the reason the buyer already knew your name when they were ready to choose. Without that familiarity, you end up paying more for that first introduction later through search, retargeting, and other bottom-funnel tactics.
The point of it all
Knowing what happened is a report. Knowing what made it affordable, and being able to show it on a chart built from tools you already own, is the difference between defending a budget and steering one.
The most valuable dashboards don’t just report numbers. They help explain the relationships behind them.
Revenue, awareness, and engagement all matter on their own. But the organizations that make the best decisions are not the ones with the most data. They’re the ones that understand how it all connects.
